Stretching the Initial Attack Line

[BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC] [NOISE] [MUSIC] Welcome to Fire EngineeringTraining Minutes, sponsored by Globe Turnout Heater. I'm Nick Martin, and today we're gonna talk about some problem solving evolutions for stretching the initial attack line and flaking out your line in some tight spaces. Let's go take a look:. When stretching the hose line estimating the stretch is one of the most important parts. It is important that we not only have enough hose but we don't have too much hose either. Many departments in the country operate off of pre-connected hose lines. Here we have the last portion of a minute man style pre-connect off of the engine. An easy way to estimate how much hose that you have left on your shoulder is to count the num, number of lengths running across your shoulder. If you keep in mind that the average width of an engine is about eight feet, each time one piece of hose goes across my shoulder that's about eight feet of hose. Using that estimation. I could estimate how much hose I have left on my shoulder and think about that in terms of how much hose I need to get to my objective. In a best case scenario we'll estimate the stretch perfectly and we'll get there with just enough hose line and not too much. In some scenarios the fire may be somewhere other than where we thought it is or perhaps we made an error in estimating our stretch. And in that case we need to be able to recover. If I was in this hallway here and needed to call for water right away to be able to fight fire or protect myself, if I was to simply throw this hose down on the ground it's gonna end up being a big kinked mess. And we're gonna have little to no usable water flow. Coming out of our nozzle. So an easy way to resolve that type of problem is to convert this line into a series of loops. To do that, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my nozzle from the bottom of my shoulder load, and I'm just gonna flip it over my right shoulder to keep it out of the way. I'm left here with a series of loops. Starting from the bottom, I take my, my glove hand and go through each loop working my way up towards the top, it's important that you put, that you go from the bottom towards the top, each hand coming through the loop. Once I have my hand through there, I allow it to come off onto my arm, take my other hand, run it through and open it up into a loop. An important part to do next is not just to throw it down, but I'm gonna step into the loop and place it down around my feet. At this point I converted it into a line that flows out of the top, and once I call for water here I'll be able to achieve full GPM flow out of my nozel and also my line will flake out of top and advance smoothly toward my objective. Now let's take a look at this in real time. [MUSIC] Start the line. These days many fire departments are operating with minimal resources it's important that we be able to perform our skills with low man power. As you saw, that line was easily deployed with one firefighter. Now, when a second firefighter becomes available, these charged loops are easily moved around to assist in advancing the line. Once the loops are charged, we can lift them up, we can carry them where we want them to go we can roll them out of the, down the hallway or down the steps, or in a more narrow environment we can leave them against the hall to leave more room. For firefighters to pass by. We'd like to thank you for watching Fire Engineering'straining minutes. And thanks to our sponsor [UNKNOWN].